In Mali, the Domino Theory Is Real

The West's intervention in Libya destabilized its neighbor. What chain reaction will France's latest war set off?

As the French military intervention in Mali nears the end of its second week, French and Malian forces have begun making slow advances into the territory controlled by several different Islamist and separatist groups. What began a year ago as a Tuareg secessionist rebellion fueled by weapons and mercenaries returning from Libya expanded into a larger war Jan. 11, when France attacked advancing Islamist forces that were moving towards Mali’s capital, Bamako. Unlike most previous Western interventions over the last two decades, France is here supporting the internationally recognized government of Mali, and its intervention has so far been welcomed by most Malians as necessary for the defense of their country. Unfortunately, French intervention now likely would not have been necessary had it not been for the intervention in Libya in 2011 that the last French president demanded and the U.S. backed. Had Western governments foreseen the possible consequences of toppling one government two years ago, there might be no need to rescue another one from disaster now.

France says it will continue fighting until the Malian government’s control over its northern territory is restored and Islamist groups are defeated, which promises to be a protracted, open-ended commitment for a nation that was already weary of its role in Afghanistan and unable to wage the war in Libya without substantial American help. The U.S. role in the conflict remains a minimal one, confined so far to intelligence assistance and logistical support. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) does pose a real security threat to North and West Africa, and it could pose a threat to Europe, but the threat to the U.S. from AQIM is minimal, if it exists at all. The U.S. has far less at stake in this fight than France or the countries in the region, so it is appropriate that they bear the costs of countering that threat.

The Libyan war did not create Mali’s internal divisions, which have existed since independence, but the destabilizing effects of changing one regime in the region exacerbated many of the country’s political weaknesses. As a result, the country was effectively cut in half, its democratically-elected president was overthrown in a coup, and hundreds of thousands of its people have been forced to become refugees. Adding to the embarrassment of Western interventionists, up until then Mali had been something of the poster child for successful democratization and development in Africa. Now it is in danger of being reduced to an even more misleading caricature as “another Afghanistan” or “another Somalia.” But thinking in these terms is bound to fail. Mali’s predicament has to be understood on its own terms.

Despite broad French and Malian support for French intervention, it is far from obvious that President Hollande’s decision was a wise or well-considered one. One of the few prominent French opponents of that decision, Dominique de Villepin, voiced his doubts shortly after the intervention began:

In Mali, none of the conditions for success are met. We will fight blindfolded absent a clear objective for the war. Stopping the southward advance of the jihadists, and retaking the north, eradicating AQIM bases are all different wars. We will fight alone absent a reliable Malian partner. With the overthrow of the president in March and the prime minister in December, the collapse of the divided Malian army, and the overall state failure, on whom can we depend? We will fight in a void absent strong regional support. ECOWAS is in the rear and Algeria has signaled its reluctance.

Like Sarkozy’s decision to use force in Libya, Hollande’s decision to go to war in Mali has been a popular one and a much-needed political boost for his ailing government, but that popularity will disappear if French involvement becomes prolonged and costly. Unless Hollande limits French objectives to those that are realistic and obtainable, he will find that de Villepin was as prescient in his warnings about war in Mali as he was when he admonished the U.S. against invading Iraq.

As far as America is concerned, there is no compelling national interest that obliges the U.S. to become more involved in the conflict in Mali. One lesson of the Libyan war is that the U.S. shouldn’t join wars of choice that our allies insist on fighting. Americans should remember that one of the reasons the French are fighting in Mali is that our government agreed to support the last French-backed military adventure in Africa. What other countries in the region would suffer serious unintended consequences from doing the same thing in Mali? How many other countries have to be wrecked before American leaders acknowledge that their interventionist remedies often do more harm than good?

The Libyan intervention’s consequences in Mali tell a cautionary tale about the disaster that unnecessary war can unleash on an entire region, but most of the Obama administration’s opponents in the U.S. refuse to understand this. Instead of seeing Mali’s current woes as a warning against going to war too quickly, hawkish interventionists are already crafting a fantasy story that this is a result of excessive American passivity. This virtually guarantees that Republican hawks will keep attacking the administration for “inaction” when they could instead be trying to hold it accountable for its past recklessness in using force. Absent a credible opposition, the administration will keep receiving the benefit of the doubt from the public on foreign policy, even when it isn’t deserved.

If the U.S. learned anything from the Libyan war experience, it ought to be that our government should be far more cautious about resorting to force and much less willing to dismiss the importance of regional stability when considering how to respond to a brutal and abusive regime. Unfortunately, the bias in favor of (military) action in U.S. foreign-policy discourse makes it virtually impossible for these lessons to take hold.

It’s true that the Libya intervention was ill-considered, a drum that needs to be beaten on until people stop praising the president for his “clean” war. It’s also true that the Libya action’s results can be seen directly in Mali. I’m not as convinced, however, that we can signal a true domino effect here, at least as the author formulates it.

The author appears to be arguing that “US involvement in Libya caused problems in Mali” and extending that to “US involvement in Mali would cause problems in other neighbors”. I don’t think the situation is that clean. Toppling the nasty dictatorship in Libya upset an otherwise somewhat-stable order in the Sahel. There is no longer a somewhat-stable order in the Sahel to upset. While further intervention might well cause other negative reactions, the cause-effect link will be far more muddy: much of the negative effects of the Mali situation are already in play and can’t be stopped with or without US action. Additionally, I don’t think adding US military force will obviously cause a negative reaction that the use of other Western (French) force is not already triggering.

This isn’t to say that the United States should jump right in. This is France’s post-colonial backyard, after all, and they probably know better what is going on than we do. The US can also legitimately claim intervention fatigue after so many years in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of the globe.

I don’t think that the author’s point of view (as I’ve laid it out, not as they did…best guess and all) withstands scrutiny, however.

Dominoes?.. Again? As in SE Asia? Glorioski, we gotta stop the march of ________(fill in the blank)!

What Mali is all about, and Libya was all about, modernised tribalism – a holdover from the good old days of colonialism. All colonials did it the same way – find some good natives wo ‘liked’ ya and raise them up in your own likeness and image. Set them up as satraps and ‘representatives’ backed up by armed force – ‘askaris’, or with some ‘stiffening’ povided by a colonial garrison.

When you leave they become the defacto government – aligned to continue pleaseing and to maintain their ascendancy. Such it is in Mali where the acendancy turned on itself giving the other tribes a ‘crack at freedom’, or as in Libya, where the ‘old guard’ is struggling to regain a position lost to Ghadaffi’s clan.

Nicolas Sarkozy indeed was largely responsible for the Western military intervention in Libya. And Bernard-Henri Levy played a key role in convincing Sarkozy France should attack Gaddafi. Levy plays footsie with American neocons.

The conflict certainly has the potential to spread. But, more long term and problematic is that it is a buttressing of French neo-colonialism in West Africa. Mali will probably end up like Chad another country where there was French military intervention against Muslim rebels in the north on behalf of a military dictatorship in the south. Notice that a number of the African states intervening with the French like Chad and Togo are basically French puppet dictatorships. So Mali will become a fully fledged neo-colony under French rule and this will among other things prevent future Tuareg rebellions in neighboring Niger.

In short, I think you’re considering the wrong counterfactuals. Neither the war in the north nor the coup that accelerated state collapse in Mali depended on the fall of Qaddafi, so it’s quite possible Mali would have found itself in a similar situation had Qaddafi hung on.

Taking another step up the causal chain, I think you’re considering the wrong counterfactual in Libya, too, as I discussed in an earlier post:

The point there is that Libya in 2011 was not teetering between long-term stability and instability. It was slipping into civil war without NATO intervention; Qaddafi probably wouldn’t have been able to quash those rebellions in full; and even if he had, his regime was bound to face similar challenges again before long because that’s what typically happens to personalistic regimes.